There's a whole lot to digest with this story. It's really difficult for me to form a coherent, concrete opinion. I can understand why the grand jury decided not to indict. I can understand why people are upset that they didn't. But there are way more shades of gray in this situation than people seem to be willing to admit, especially the people who don't believe that an indictment was necessary.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fjs10st.pdfGranted, this is for cases at large, not just police officers. I understand why there's additional consideration for cases involving police officers, but there is a ridiculously low rate of even INDICTMENT for cases in which officers kill a civilian. Not even conviction... the INDICTMENT rate is low. These guys aren't even getting put in front of a jury.
We're going to see the evidence from this case released to the public, so I guess I'll withhold additional judgment until then about whether or not he should have been indicted. It's really hard to say based on what we've been presented in the media.
But going back to the issue of race and the riots in the streets. Yes, it's absolutely despicable that people are burning their home town's streets up and looting stores. Yes, the violence is extremely unnecessary.
But to play devil's advocate, consider this: black men, women and children are slaughtered every day in the streets. Black-on-black crime makes up a significant portion of this, but the point stands: the inner cities across the nation are basically battlebrounds and innocent people are being murdered every. single. day. How often do any of these murders make the mainstream news? It takes an unusual case such as this one, a case in which a white police officer shot up an unarmed (yet potentially dangerous, who knows, we don't really have trustworthy witnesses it seems) black kid.
Nobody ever pays attention to the scores of murders that happen every single day in places like Ferguson. People don't give a damn, they really don't. The only time the nation begins to pay attention is when black people begin to amass and riot in the streets. It takes violence, looting and rioting for people to give them and their plight even a moment's notice. For once, white America is actually paying attention to what people living in heavily underprivileged neighborhoods are dealing with on an EVERYDAY basis.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not at ALL justifying the violence and rioting happening in Ferguson. I think it's despicable, and that these people should be held responsible for their actions. But you also have to understand that these riots and this violence are a symptom of a much larger problem: these people have been marginalized and systematically oppressed for a couple hundred years, and we turn a blind eye to them until they can't take it any more and have to resort to extreme measures like this to get people to finally pay attention. Yet even this, their only way of getting people to notice them and their problems, only makes things worse for them, because people (understandably) look at what's happening in Ferguson and say, "why should I pity these people? This is why black people in America are only getting in the way of their own advancement."
Don't you see?! It's an incurable, vicious cycle because from the day a child is born into a poor black family in the ghetto, the chips are stacked against them in a monumental way for
their entire life. They are forced into slums and segregated areas of cities specifically designed to keep the poor away from the middle and upper class. They are forced to go through public school systems where there is little security, where teachers might not necessary even have college degrees in education, and where there are extremely low academic standards. They grow up in families and in communities that have been hardened because of everything they've faced in their lifetime, so even when a lucky child is able to break free of the norm and start doing well in school or gets a good job, they're criticized for "acting white," because they've taken on characteristics of the people that have been systematically oppressing them for generations.
It's fucking pathetic, the whole situation, and Ferguson is just a tiny little microcosm of this. And what's even more pathetic is that nothing is going to ever change, at least not in our lifetimes. We're barely 50 years removed from desegregation of schools in America and everyone likes to pretend that we're living in a post-racial society, or they try to make half-assed attempts to improve the quality of life of our nation's poor black people without really paying attention to the issues that are actually at stake. (Like, for instance, affirmative action? A fucking joke. How about actually making an attempt to overhaul an educational and economic system that has poor/black people disadvantaged from day one, then you won't have to give them pity admission?)
Sorry for the rant, it's just such a frustrating story and I'm sick of these articles coming out that lack any understanding of the kind of nuanced layers involved in this situation. This is way bigger than cop-on-black violence, black-on-black violence, rioting, etc. This is about the way our systems and entities are set up.
People have been calling the people rioting in Ferguson monsters, and that's understandable, they're doing some horrific things. But who created the monsters in the first place?
